A Marxist Analysis of the Metrification of Academic Labor: Research Impact Metrics and Socially Necessary Labor Time

Research impact metrics have proliferated in the context of the commodification of academia and academic research, being widely applied for the evaluation of the performance of academic workers. The existing literature on this question has so far failed to satisfactorily explain two key questions in relation to research impact metrics, namely, what dimension of academic labor they refer to and measure, and how their deployment in evaluation processes interweaves with the extension of capitalist relations of production in academia. Examination of the social constitution of research impact metrics from a Marxist perspective shows that metrics are indexes of socially necessary labor time, so that they indicate whether a given expenditure of academic labor has resulted in a use-value and has been undertaken according to the prevailing conditions of production and the average degree of intensity and skill. This analysis will also shed light on why research impact metrics have become so prominent in contemporary academia. The reason lies in the private and independent form taken by social labor in the wake of the unfolding of capitalist relations of production in academia. In conditions of private and independent production, the social validation of labor occurs ex post, namely, once that labor has been expended.